Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @09:42AM
from the jeeves-wanted-to-much-money dept.

latif writes "Microsoft has been chasing Yahoo for quite a while now. Most people think that it all started with Microsoft's acquisition bid for Yahoo, but this is not so. It is well-known that Microsoft and Yahoo have been negotiating since at least May of 2006, and may have been negotiating since 2003. I have done a thorough analysis utilizing information made public over the past five years and my analysis suggests that most people are completely wrong about what Microsoft wants from Yahoo."

Microsoft just wants to make their name really exciting. When they buy / merge with Yahoo! they can combine the names and all of a sudden "Microsoft" becomes, "Microsoft!" - the most exciting company ever! When that happens be on the look out for "Windows 7!"

From the linked article:
The Microsoft bid never made sense from a business perspective either. Yahoo has always had stale search offerings, second rate search technology, and a mediocre unmotivated workforce. Yahoo derives its value primarily from the massive web-traffic the company controls, but the cost of controlling this web-traffic is likely to be prohibitive for Microsoft

Second rate, stale, mediocre, unmotivated: sounds like a perfect fit for the Microsoft empire.

Well if I were a second rate, stale, mediocre, and unmotivated employee I might take it upon myself to use some of my free time to eliminate that page from Yahoo's index. Then I'd create my own page saying something similar (or worse) about the author of the story... and I'd make sure it was #1 if you searched for his name.:P

Wow. Yahoo definitely does not have stale search offerings or second-rate search technology.

Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.

The only thing I can agree with is the unmotivated workforce--but they are in no way a mediocre bunch.

YHOO survived the dot-com bust because they are a well-diversified and complete web service company.GOOG is striving to become that, but GOOG is flavor-of-the month because GOOG is the glamorous company that avoided the dot-com bust because they started later.

Come on, try to be objective when comparing YHOO and GOOG.

Good press does not necessarily mean better company.

Bad press does not necessarily mean worse company.

It's a shame so many of you feel this way without any sort of objective research.

Just because you're not the flavor-of-the-month search engine doesn't mean your technology is stale or second rate.

Except that Google's become synonymous with search and has pretty much owned search for the last half decade -- and Yahoo has made no appreciable gains. I would say by definition Yahoo is at least second-rate. I don't think you can call a market leader for years running, with a brand ubiquity like they've got, a "flavor of the month".

When was the last time you heard someone tell someone to "just Yahoo that" or "I AltaVista'd so-and-so"?

I work with several ex-Yahoos, they're all wonderful and bright people... but Yahoo needs to adopt the Avis mentality and try harder. They're behind in search, Musicmatch->Y! Music didn't pan out, and they've got a whole raft of other unneeded sites/services. (omg.yahoo.com anyone ? )

Living in denial about your competitive ecosystem is the surest ticket to irrelevance and extinction.

Yeah, they're so flavour of the month, I've only been using them since before the turn of the century.</sarcasm>

Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.

The search results, even in the early days when the main Google page was still marked as beta (I remember using the beta version in 2000 when I was still at the uni), were (and still are although somewhat less glaringly now) superior to any of the established commercial operators (like Yahoo) at that time. It was clear even then that Google had an emerging franchise in an industry that was already packed with me too and also ran search companies (anyone remember HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, etc...).

Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.

I'd add another thing to that. This is my experience, your mileage may have varied etc etc.

Way back before then - circa 1997 - AltaVista was king of search. However, around 1999 or so the results from AltaVista started to go down the tubes - most of the hits were either spam or totally irrelevant.

Out of practically nowhere comes Google - with results which were actually useful and little or no spam. Doesn't take a superbrain to decide to stick to using Google. But the Internet is a fickle place, and it's a lot easier to visit an alternate website than it is to take your bricks & mortar business elsewhere. (For one thing, "there's only one shop in this town that sells N" is not a valid argument). The mighty can fall, and I don't doubt it will happen again.

Google has been around for quite a few years. I don't see it as a fad. Just like back in 1994 when people said Linux is just a fad.With software you may be first rate but if you don't innovate fast enough it becomes second rate.

I think this is a bit unfair.I actually like Yahoo.I use the my.yahoo home page. I think it is better than the Google version.I actually like the directory. Sometimes I like to browse a subject and not do just a search for it. It is real handy when looking for things like towns in a state.I think Yahoo has it's strengths as does Google.I will admit that I wouldn't use my.yahoo if I didn't have firefox.

I used to like Yahoo's mail. It was a pretty simple, basic web based mailbox. It didn't have much AJAX or other dynamic elements, but it was pretty easy to use and it was functional across many browsers.

Then they replaced it with their Mail 2.0 abomination. Slow, clunky, prone to mysterious errors - it was like GMail's evil twin. After they introduced that atrocity of a UI, I've been using Gmail exclusively.

I do tend to agree that Yahoo ads are just annoying.Slashdot's ads are also annoying to me.I have some rules.1. NO POPs I don't care if they are up down over or under.2. NO ANIMATION. Motion drives me nuts.3. Don't put them in the middle of the text. Off to the side is fine.I don't think that Yahoo's are any worse than Slashdot's.

Alright, the article is worth reading and forwards an an interesting and compelling theory about Microsoft's "real" reason for wanting Yahoo. (Can there only be one reason? Shouldn't there be lots?) But here's where it crossed the line into gross speculation.

Google does have a perpetual royalty-free license, but $30 million was not all Google paid for the license. Evidently, Google is hiding some material terms of its patent settlement with Yahoo from the general public and its investors. Google had a legal obligation to disclose anything material that was likely to influence its future business operations, but Google's management subverted that obligation.

This article does little to convince me of Google wrongdoing, but a lot to remind us why business model patents make no sense and ought to be done away with. I can see the 361 patent playing into Microsoft's calculations, but if it's as important as this article suggests, Microsoft would be pointing that out to everyone who cared to listen... and paying Yahoo's asking price.

So, I'd mod the article interesting and informative, but not especially insightful.

Microsoft instead of proposing a more competitive deal has been busy trying to subvert the Yahoo Google deal by raising antitrust concerns, and even seems to have succeeded at getting the US Department of Justice to [investigate the deal].

I've been wondering why the Microsoft shills on this site have been the ones protesting the Yahoo/Google deal the most. Now it makes sense.

It only makes sense because Microsoft is floating upon an ocean of patent bubbles. The '361 patent is unenforceable in the real world. But it lets Microsoft get in on the Google paid search game, without possibly setting off a patent Armageddon war meltdown.

Microsoft's main revenue source (very expensive questionable quality software) is under serious threat. Google main revenue source is not under serious competitive threat. Google would get that '361 patent invalidated in a heart beat if it was a serious threat to their business. Microsoft, however, will not undertake the same tactic to get in on the paid search game, because business method patents are practically synonymous with software function patents.

Yahoo has nothing. It's no surprise corporate raiders would not take the bait. Any hidden asset value play of the '361 patent is an SCO disaster in waiting. But Yahoo is still in the game, has a chance down the line to be competitive against both Microsoft and Google.

Such navigation is what Bill Gates considered "good business skills". But MSFT can't afford to pay for the '361 patent chip, and Yahoo can't afford to sell it. And the '361 patent chip is completely worthless in the real world, but billions in stock valuations are being swung around because of it. Maybe Microsoft is just counting on the outcome that Google wouldn't press the patent nuclear war button also (as Microsoft would at least attempt to retaliate against all of Google's on-line services).

In the meantime, innovation and competition is stagnated, and consumers are worse off paying for lower quality products with higher prices -- ACROSS THE BOARD.

Once you remove the 'hidden material terms' part of the argument, the rest of it mostly falls apart. And I would be very surprised if Google had left themselves potentially open to a charge of fraud of this magnitude.

I'm an attorney tangentially involved in preparing SEC documents for a major corporation. Based on my experience with how seriously companies take their disclosure obligations, I would be shocked if Google were actively engaged in hiding a "material" settlement with Yahoo.

For what it's worth, materiality is a term of art -- and certainly any royalty paid by Google to Yahoo to settle a patent claim would almost certainly be material, likely and quantifiable -- which would likely trigger Google's obligation to disclose the potential liability in its 10-K and 10-Q.

Is it possible that Google is playing fast and loose with its securities obligations, or that it has come up with some novel legal theory about why it wouldn't be required to report such a deal? Well, sure. People and companies do stupid things all the time. But is it likely....?

Wow.... that's a really serious allegation to lodge without any "smoking gun". Interesting article, but I have to think there's an element of conspiracy theorism in it that does not sound credible to me.

I especially like how he says Yahoo's claim that MS isn't really interested can't be disingenuous, cause it could lead to trouble -- then accuses Google of the same sort of misbehavior. And doesn't address the apparent discrepancy. So yeah, it's interesting food for thought, but I don't think as a whole the article holds up under its own weight.

While I am aware that implementation doesn't have any real bearing on the task at hand, it does affect the culture. Yahoo makes use of open source technologies (as does Google.) Microsoft only uses Microsoft technologies. When they bought Hotmail (and subsequently turned it into a dump) they replaced the BSD boxes with Windows at a ratio of 1 to 5, (5x many windows boxen) in order to support the load.

Now Microsoft wants to buy search. Given that "search" is basically a text box that returns URLs, and Microsoft already has that capability, one has to look at what is the difference between MS and Yahoo? Why is Yahoo more valuable than Microsoft in paid search? Really, I don't know. But I can guess. Yahoo doesn't care if you're using Microsoft technologies. This has two sides - 1) you get equal support in FF and IE, 2) developers don't have to use Microsoft technologies. The "not invented here" does not apply. It's about getting a job done.

Buying Yahoo won't fix the problem if Yahoo is forced to change to the MS way. Obviously it's not worked for them.

I think MS is just buying time if they think they can do what they've always done. Clearly, the decision to buy yahoo search is the brain child of a business man with no appreciation of why things the way they are. If MS is going to buy Yahoo, then they have to admit defeat and not see it as acquiring static property to be added to a portfolio. They have to buy Yahoo then learn why they failed, or better learn why they failed first.

MS is rife with "not invented here" egoism: IE (Netscape),.Net (Java), SilverLight(Flash), Windows (BSD/Linux), and now Search. I can understand why a company should drink their own cool-aid, but when people start dropping, its time to change the formula.

Now Microsoft wants to buy search. Given that "search" is basically a text box that returns URLs, and Microsoft already has that capability, one has to look at what is the difference between MS and Yahoo? Why is Yahoo more valuable than Microsoft in paid search? Really, I don't know. But I can guess. Yahoo doesn't care if you're using Microsoft technologies. This has two sides - 1) you get equal support in FF and IE, 2) developers don't have to use Microsoft technologies. The "not invented here" does not apply. It's about getting a job done.

It's called a "brand name". Microsoft, since its first foray on to the Internet with MSN in 1995-96 has never been able to produce a popular online presence. Guys like Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo were already filling the search market, and Microsoft was unable to puncture their dominance. Google, of course, pretty much kicked the shit out of Yahoo, which now holds a very distant second place, and yet, Microsoft still isn't on the map. I think Microsoft (correctly) has come to the conclusion that it matters not at all what they do, people don't care about msn.com or live.com. They go into Tools-->Options when they get their brand new Windows computer and change it to google.com. Even having a search box that defaults to Microsoft's search has failed, as basically threats that the EU is going to go medieval on their ass have pretty much forced them to open it up more easily to competitors (read: Google).

With more and more apps set to be delivered via the Web, this is about getting a platform that they have a hope in hell of someone actually using. I still think it will fail. Yahoo is, as I said, a very distant second place. Google is indeed the new Microsoft, and as with Microsoft's competitors in the past, Microsoft is finding itself being very effectively locked out of a very important market.

I'm not at all comfortable with yet-another-computer-monopoly, and I don't buy at all into Google's "do no evil" mantra, since, so far, they've done plenty. But there's a great deal of irony. It couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

Yes. "Locking out" is implying that Google is doing something to prevent MS from competing. MS has every opportunity to beat Google. Even with MS leveraging their OS and browser as much as they can, Google is still handily beating them. Even with MS buying every little new search technology they can get, Google is still beating them.

In the future, everyone might not be as loyal to Google as they are now, but Google understands that their business is service. Services traditionally have had no lock-in.

Many people have predicted the doom of MS with every little new competitor and/or technology fad. One of the things that has kept MS in the game is money. Lots of money. They still make profits on their core products which support their other not-so profitable products. Frankly if MS wasn't behind things like Xbox and Zune, those brands would have folded by now. While they are not bad products, Xbox hasn't been profitable until recently and Zune has a way to go. If they were independent companies, the

I agree. With business being business, I am considering shorting their stock since I have not seen any new value being created. And customers buy value.Windows 95 was value.Windows 2000 was value.Office 95/97 was value.DirectX was value.Visual Studio 98 was value.

XP was not value. (It was nothing substantial over w2k)Windows Vista was not value. (Negative value).Net/Silverlight was not value. (Attempt to re-lockin developers, with POSIX un-compliance, whole new libs). C# is no value because it is 1/2way between C++ and Python (or Ruby).IE was not value.Office 2003/2007 was not value.Visual Studio after 2008 was not of value (a side effect of.Net)All Microsoft services are not of value.Virtualization is not of value (VMware leads)

So up until about 2001 MS was providing value. Since then it's all been maintenance or catch-up. But during this period, competitors advanced. What MS had provided as value was commoditized. (Linux, OpenOffice) Or people started doing it better (Apple). MS does not have a value proposition anymore.

As you indicate, they are floating on cash. If MS can't re-invent themselves, things rest on the bottom when there is no water left. Its like a ballistic trajectory, and without another rocket stage, it's going to come down. But MS does not operate in a vacuum. Ubuntu and OSX are my main reasons for supporting the short position. The EEE PC is nice anecdotal evidence of Linux providing sufficient value. I also like Qt as a good platform for Win/Lin/OS development.

Further backing the short position is that there is no one or set of technologies that needs to be delivered. In 95-2000, we needed a stable kernel and apps, we needed networking. We got those. In 2001 we needed a safe, stable browser. We got that (in 2007 with FF2).

I buy stock in what I use. This is good for me in the tech sector because I am ahead of the curve. I use FF, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Adobe, Verizon (FIOS). I keep watching Ubuntu. I'm not pining for anything Microsoft has in the pipeline. I am pining for FF and Apple, and Adobe (AIR, though I'd rather a W3C platform).

I'd get behind MS again if they ever brought value back, but they are just focusing on taking it away from others (.Net, SilverLight, Search). That is a sign to me that they don't know what to do next either.

If Google is number one and Yahoo! and MS are contenders for the number two spot, then MS buying Yahoo! is just a way for MS to jump ahead in the standings. MS-Yahoo! might even contend for number one if MS combined the stats. Multi-billion dollar industry there.

MS has been a failure at search. This was not a big deal until search became ad revenue, and ad revenue became the new profit center in the IT world. Like the World Wide Web, MS failed to innovate, but unlike the WWW, MS was not able to use it's monopoly of the desktop to compensate for that basic, persistent, and enduring lack of imagination. MSN remains the laughing stock of search.

Even with billions of dollars in the bank, 90% of the browsing population using IE, which forces people to MSN, MSN still has less than 1/2 the market of Yahoo, and not even twice the market share of AOL. This tends to indicate that MS has no clue how to direct users to content, but that they don't even know how to learn how to do such a thing. Basically, because MS cannot force MS Windows users to search with MSN, beyond what already exists in IE, and MS cannot undercut the prices of the product, as it did with XBox, MS is not succeeding in the search market. Those are it's two primary tools for success, and neither is suitable here.

The only option is go after Yahoo. There are two benefits to this, only one seems to be covered in the link. By far the most important is that the combined Yahoo/MS market share will be 35% This should help market ads. The downside risk is how many people will stop using Yahoo because of MS ownership, and the changes that the clearly incompetent MS staff(remember MSN only has 10%, that is for a reason) make to the service. This gives MS legitimacy in the marketplace.

The second, as implied by the link is that MS may be able to make trouble for google. This will result in what MS does best, funneling money from productive interests to fuel it's unproductive coffers, but will not likely affect Googles market share.

Here is why. Google is still innovating customer service. There are free apps on the web to do all sorts of stuff. They know their core business, bringing eyeballs to ads, and do what it takes to keep those eyeballs happy. Google is free to do whatever it takes. MS is not free to do whatever it takes. For instance, why is MS charging a subscription fee for MS Office. Why aren't they putting a Web version on MSN. Tell me how many people would create an MSN account and use it as their portal if they got to use even a limited version of MS word for free in the deal.

Why indeed. There are only two possible reasons. First, MS does not have the technology to do what Google is already doing. Second, the MS Office franchise, stale as it is, is still too valuable for MS to use to drive what is clear to become the future profit center for any large software concern. Again, MS looks back, everyone else looks forward. This is not bad, MS makes a lot of money on it, but it why MS can and does overpay for new tech(re: facebook), and why Yahoo is a deal that has to be done, even it eventually fails and means the end of Yahoo, and 80% market share for google.

There's a lot of speculation here, but it's all just conjecture. There's definitely not any new facts in this article, and it is only "analysis" in the sense that it contains a much larger volume of speculation than most of the 1,000,897 other articles on the same subject. Obviously a new definition of the word, "analysis" of which I was not previously aware...

I think MS's designs on Yahoo have to do not with search but with open technologies like YUI [yahoo.com] and popular sites like Flickr. With an acquisition of Yahoo, MS could kill YUI and various other open-source technologies, in a way that it has done before. (In the late 1990s they acquired Bay Area start-up DimensionX, who then made the Liquid Reality Java VRML toolkit. Liquid Reality was buried and the DimensionX developers were moved to MS's ActiveX division.)

Meanwhile, Flickr (the number 1 photo-sharing website by far) would fit into MS's standard-controlling strategy. Millions of users visit Flickr to share their content and see others' content. If all one's friends and photo-sharing communities are there, that's incentive to not jump ship to a rival site. If Flickr's AJAX/DHTML web site was replaced by a Silverlight application ("enhanced" with some Vista Aeroglass-style effects, of course), all these people would have to install Silverlight. Additionally, Microsoft could drive adoption of their Windows Media still-image standard as a replacement for JPEG, by recoding all the hosted images to WM format and serving it out only as such. All of a sudden, Silverlight is massively more popular, and WM is a major format for photographic still images.

Yahoo's messenger and MSN are two of the larger messengers and if MS locks them in together and then tries to tie those users into their other services then it might be a benefit along with MS actually having a search engine someone uses.

Microsoft passed on buying Overture (and its patent on paid search) due to antitrust concerns. So Yahoo! bought them. Now Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo! (and squeeze Google using the patent?). What happened to the antitrust issue?

Yahoo! Is playing both sides against each other in an attempt to collect $trategic inve$tment capital from Google and cause their stock price to climb. But Google could just sit back and say, "See you in court with a copy of the Sherman Antitrust Act." to Microsoft.

I won't speak for the rest of it, but there's a huge problem, IMHO, with these assertions:

1. Adobe could have an antitrust complaint against the purchase. - I just can't see what that would be. Anyone?

2. Buying Yahoo! does very much for Silverlight. How exactly? Silverlight is a threat to Flash by simply existing, because MS *already* has the great inertia of the incumbent monopolist. What has Webmail got to do with pushing Silverlight??

ARE there software companies that people actually like?! Google used to be up there, but they keep poking at the "do no evil" mantra. Every other software company I can think of has a core group of users that like the product, but those same folks also seem pretty ambivalent about the company.

It seems that the hardware companies get the love because you can touch the shiny. Examples: Tivo, Apple, Harley Davidson, Crispy Creme...

Backwards. That copy of OS X you get with your MacBook or iPhone is a selling point for the hardware. Apple makes diddly on their software (~$140 million for the release of Leopard and you can bet that sales of iLife and iWork will be less than that...), compared to the ~$2.5 billion they make per quarter on sales of hardware.

They have to show revenue growth but it is impossible. What do they have without their monopoly? A lot of third rate code that no one wants. Between Vista and Open Office, they are showing revenue problems. Buying Yahoo makes it look like they can extend their monopoly to the web but it's Hotamail all over again. They are proving that they can spend even more money to be an also ran. At best they can crush and rob Yahoo, but that won't do anything to Google or anyone else who wants to run services with free software. The harder M$ tries, the more obvious it is that their game is over.

Heh... Stock valuation doesn't indicate anything save what price a shareseller is willing to part with his shares over.

It doesn't, overall, indicate anything of the state of affairs within the company or it's actual overall health. They don't have the cash war-chest they used to have (they paid out dividends recently, remember...) and Vista's a flop and Office is sitting stagnant compared to it's past sales.

Not sitting as pretty in the long term as the stock price would lead you to believe it is.

In theory, yes. In practice, it's all about speculation. The speculation used to be about the present value of all future dividends, but now the speculation is mostly focused on how much someone else will pay for it.

Microsoft's stock performance has at best been average compared to the NASDAQ during the last 10 years. IBM has actually been a stronger performer. Microsoft's spectacular growth years were between 1995 and 1998.

Microsoft's 2008 Q1 income sounds kind of impressive (20-25% growth over last year) until one realizes that that is due to exchange rate changes, not new business.

Microsoft Live has about as much mindshare (search volume) as Yahoo's failed Yahoo 360. Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for the very top somewhere, but not in on-line services.

In conclusion: More PCs were shipped, anti-piracy was more effective, and like you point out, online services we're "barely significant", but being such a small input into gross profit so far, barely registers either - so worry not, MS jobs are secure for quite some time to come.

There were a lot of dotcoms with a huge stock value just before they imploded. After many years of being a safe stock (just average as an investment, but safe), it takes a while for a bunch of investors who only use their computers by rote to see that things are changing.

If current stock value alone was predictive of future performance, we'd all be Wall Street millionaires by now.

There is room to debate on MS's likely future, but the stock price doesn't say much.

No matter how much you hate Microsoft or boldly state that their business has obviously failed, it doesn't actually make it true. Open Office is causing MS revenue problems? Yeah, right. Let's try to stick to discussing how things are in the world we actually live in.

As far as this goes:

At best they can crush and rob Yahoo, but that won't do anything to Google or anyone else who wants to run services with free software.

If TFA is correct, they could do an awful lot to Google by consuming Yahoo. Not by competing in the marketplace but with the terrible power of patents.

Random predictions of MS's demise are as old as the day is long. Free software has been the panacea since Windows 1 came about. The folks at MS must know something you don't as I'm sure they've made more money than you. Whether or not you agree with MS, they achieved their goal, make a lot of money. Whats obvious is that you want their game to be over because you disagree with it. Unfortunately no one cares what you want.

While what you are saying is true,the simple fact is I have NEVER seen hatred for a product like I have for Vista,and that includes WinME. I have been building,selling,repairing and customizing PCs and networks since the days of DOS and Win3.1,but the sheer public hatred for the stink that is Vista is just unreal. I recently built a machine for a customer whose sole requirement was that this machine be upgrading for a long while so he wouldn't have to touch Vista,and this is for a guy who has been happily u

While what you are saying is true,the simple fact is I have NEVER seen hatred for a product like I have for Vista,and that includes WinME. I have been building,selling,repairing and customizing PCs and networks since the days of DOS and Win3.1,but the sheer public hatred for the stink that is Vista is just unreal. I recently built a machine for a customer whose sole requirement was that this machine be upgrading for a long while so he wouldn't have to touch Vista,and this is for a guy who has been happily

Oh,please,mr Fanboi,Vista is a turkey and you know it. The only guys that I have seen that actually like Vista either only use the machine for web surfing or who got monster dual and quad rigs tricked out with tons of RAM and the latest ATI or Nvdia monster card for DX10. Tell you what: why don't you go down to your local best Buy or Wally World,pick up the bottom of the line Vista rig(as that is what the majority of home consumers do,buy on price,which is why Dell has so many cheapy machines) and see how long you can run it before you pull your hair out.

Talk to your local computer stores,ask THEM how their sales are of Vista VS XP. I can tell you that most of us have quit carrying the thing because it ends up sitting there. When folks come to me for a new machine the LAST thing they want is Vista. And I never said this was anything other than my opinion,but that opinion is based on nearly 2 decades of selling and servicing MSFT products. How many years have YOU been selling and servicing MSFT products?

The simple fact is I never had any problem selling machines with WinME. Yes,it was buggy and you had to be really careful about what peripherals you paired it with,as a bad driver would kill it deader than dixie. But then a funny thing happened,along came XP SP2. Folks got used to everything just working and plugging anything they wanted in and having it go. You expect me to tell my customers who need a machine for SOHO work and basic web use that I need to build them a gamer rig just to get the full Vista "experience", AND while I'm at it I need to convince them to throw away most of their peripherals because MSFT boned the driver model and the manufacturers aren't going to bother with Vista drivers for 90% of their hardware? Yeah,and my business would be closed within the month. If you have Vista running smooth on your quad core with sh*tloads of RAM I say good for you. As a buddy that used to service the F4 said "If you strap giant jet engines to a brick it'll fly,but that don't make it anything more than a brick with giant jet engines".

Vista was designed for the "PC of the future" only the future isn't going where MSFT thought. It is going for lower powered,easy to carry laptops and netbooks instead of giant quad core rigs. And the gamer customers I've had are sticking with DX9 because Vista simply cuts into their hardware more than they care for. With a company the size of MSFT,inertia will keep them afloat for awhile. But the whole reason that companies like Intel and Nvidia are getting into the low powered chip market and why MSFT has such a hard on for buying Yahoo is because big and bloated simply won't fly. Why do you think they are offering XP Home instead of Vista Basic on the EEE? Because they couldn't give it away with Vista Basic,that's why. Funny that the only other time I saw this level of fanboi-ism about a MSFT OS was when the public decided WinME sucked. I gues that old saying "everything old is new again" is true,huh?

You were the one that started with the rudeness,your entire reply was basically how wonderful Vista was and how i didn't have a clue what i was talking about. does Intel not have a clue too? because Intel [cnet.com] is skipping Vista. And i can find you example after example of the same thing. We have NEVER had Fortune 500 companies elect to stick with an old OS rather than simply upgrade when the 3 year cycle comes around,ever.

Um,you do know that dual cores with 2Gb of RAM aren't what you find at Dell,Best Buy,Wal mart,etc,right? In fact the big market is right now a Celeron or Sempron with 1Gb of RAM,although I still see plenty of machines with 512Mb,although those are finally being fazed out. You do realize that one core is pretty much dealing with Vista,right? Here is a little experiment you can do to see the difference between Vista and XP: make an image of your HDD. benchmark Vista,then install XP and benchmark it. The performance gains will probably make you cry. And as for gamers switching to Vista? I have had a few build $2000+ SLI rigs switch to Vista for DX10,although I have had two come back and ask for dual boot simply because of performance and compatibility issues. The biggest thing I have been seeing here is the hacked DX10 on XP trick. I recently played Halo 2 and Juarez on a customers new gamer rig and DX10 ran great.

And finally what does the EEE have to do with it? Are you kidding? Surely you can't be serious,unless you want us to honestly expect us to believe you are not a shill. Laptops are selling like hotcakes,and they aren't those Alienware monsters. I have personally seen my college campus spread with EEEs and other minibooks in less than a year. I have had Housewives,salesmen,office managers,etc come to me to order them machines in the last 12 months,and the first thing out of their mouths after saying they want a laptop is "Can you get one of those EEEs?" Companies like Intel and Nvidia don't spend the serious R&D money required to build new chips without doing serious market research. People want cheap,small,eay to use laptops that they can slip in a handbag or briefcase and just go. Vista is bloated(15Gb default install,WTF?),sucks power,and on mini machines like the cloudbook,EEE,Mininote,etc it is simply too slow to use. Do you really think all these companies are coming out with netbooks because there is no market?

IMHO the only thing you got right in your post was the Apple iPhone,and I think they will end up the future,which scares the hell out of MSFT. I am betting within the next two years you'll see all the cell phone providers offering small EEE style laptops for free with a 2 year service agreement to use their wireless data plan. The phone companies can lock in all those customers,and for what the average person is using a laptop for(webmail,surfing,document editing) any lightweight Linux distro with Open office will work beautifully. Why do YOU think MSFT is so disparate to get into the ad business? Because they know if Win7 isn't a hit they are going to be seriously hurting. Most folks aren't buying gamer rigs,they are buying based on price. And on what you get from Dell,HP,etc for a basic PC Vista is a truly painful experience.I have already had two customers bring in single core Dells that the HDD literally thrashed itself to death.

If you have read anything put out by Ballmer in the last three years or any of the emails in the class action suit you know that Vista wasn't designed for users,its "protected path" top to bottom DRM was designed to appeal to big media in the hopes of becoming the iTunes of video. But folks by and large are not using their pc as a HTPC,they are watching their videos on their Chinese DVD player or their PS3. All MSFT has done by trying to force eveyone into the same DRM overloaded box is p*ss off a large portion of their customers,who are know looking at alternatives. Whether that alternative will be Linux or Apple,or MSFT getting its act together with Win7 I

You can't possibly have missed all of that bad press, so pretending it doesn't exist is what makes you sound like a completely fraudulent shill. If you want to sound honest, acknowledge the widespread bad press and try to address it.

Or continue as you have been, and expect to have zero credibility with 100% of the readers -- why even bother?

I concur with the most recent ancestor poster. I object to repeatedly tautologically redundant grandiloquence. I eschew such verbiage diligently. This very response shows you all that I am the very epitome of plain talking simple folk, scratch scratch, the very epitome of rustic linguistics.